Northlight Theatre unveils plans for a bold return to Evanston

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

A rendering shows the proposed Northlight Theatre in Evanston, from Sherman Avenue looking north. The proposed theater has a 350-seat main stage and a flexible secondary one. Also included are a lobby with cafe, an outdoor terrace bar, and rehearsal, office and education spaces.

A rendering shows the proposed Northlight Theatre in Evanston, from Sherman Avenue looking north. The proposed theater has a 350-seat main stage and a flexible secondary one. Also included are a lobby with cafe, an outdoor terrace bar, and rehearsal, office and education spaces. (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill)

The north suburban Northlight Theatre plans to return to Evanston, the city of its birth, in a spectacular way: as the street-level centerpiece of a shimmering-rise, 37-story development replete with a boutique hotel, a restaurant, high-end rental apartments and 250 parking spaces.

The new proposal, slated to be unveiled to the public Tuesday night at a 1st Ward neighborhood meeting, would plant Northlight in the 1700 block of Sherman Avenue in the heart of downtown Evanston, just north of the intersection of Sherman and Church streets. The mixed-use development, led by Farpoint Development (the principals include Scott Goodman and Patrick O’Connor) and the work of the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, would return entertainment to a block once partly occupied by the Varsity Theater, although, under the plan, the remnants of that historic building would be razed.

“I believe that a theater that is one of the top companies in all of the Chicagoland area would be a significant economic driver in downtown Evanston,” said Evanston Mayor Steve Hagerty. “We’ve got an educated population and public transportation and a lot of very successful senior-living communities. This could be a very dynamic development for downtown Evanston.”

“This kind of anchor really can energize a downtown in a way that we don’t see very much anymore, now that retail has a diminished bricks-and-mortar footprint,” said O’Connor, the developer. “Evanston has been looking for years to solidify a downtown arts district. And Northlight, with their track record, is about as bona fide an operator as you are going to find on the North Shore.”

O’Connor said the Varsity, which opened in 1926, closed in 1988 and since has been mostly hidden from view after retailer The Gap took up residence in the former lobby, was in too poor shape to reuse.

For the past 20 years, Northlight has been in residence in the smaller theater at the shared North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. The tenure there has been mostly successful, but the theater does not control the building, front of house or the box office, and the bulk of Northlight’s roughly 6,000 subscribers (and almost all the artists who work there) travel to Skokie from either Evanston or Chicago.

Northlight, which has an annual budget of $3.2 million, was founded as the Evanston Theatre Company in 1974 and, in the 1990s, occupied the now-demolished Coronet Theatre, about a mile south of the new proposed location.

According to Tim Evans, executive director of Northlight, the new Evanston development would include both a 350-seat main stage and a roughly 100-seat second stage. Evans said the plan would require Northlight to raise about $20 million for the build-out. Depending on how that went, Northlight then could either rent the space from Farpoint, like any other commercial tenant, or, if enough money was procured, buy that portion of the building outright. History suggests that market-level rents in high-profle locales can be problematic for arts groups, but the developers of the project promised flexibility.

“We really want Northlight,” O’Connor said. “We will do everything we can to make it work.”

“This would give us a tremendous opportunity to develop new work, and to expand our overall artistic reach,” said longtime Northlight artistic director BJ Jones, who has long sought a return to Evanston.

Previously, Northlight was part of a plan for a development on nearby Benson Avenue, also in downtown Evanston. That idea stalled after it proved difficult to acquire all the necessary properties and the developers’ attention shifted to Sherman Avenue, a preferable site from Northlight’s point of view.

Indeed, the new site would be an enviable location for any nonprofit theater. It’s in the heart of the successful downtown of a theater-loving college town, an easy stroll to the campus of Northwestern University, and walking distance to Metra and the CTA. And, on the other side of the equation, Evanston already is well-stocked with restaurants and cafes, all of which surely would benefit from theatergoers looking for convenient sustenance before or after a show.

The city of Evanston has long discussed with its citizenry creating a performing arts complex, although most of those conversations have focused on shared spaces with several professional and community arts groups, which tend to be impractical.

Aside from studies and fees paid to consultants, these conversations rarely have involved any proffer of significant public funding. And according to Hagerty, this endeavor also ideally would come together with city cooperation but without precious city funds.

“I’d like to see the private sector develop this multiuse facility,” the mayor said. “We have this thriving downtown, but we need density, which is people walking around and spending money.”

Should the proposal pass muster with Evanston’s notoriously opinionated populace and get built — the fall of 2020 is a target occupancy date — the new building will also allow Northlight to better compete for both audiences and philanthropic dollars with its friendly rival to the north. That would be Writers Theatre in Glencoe, which raised the bar in 2016 for North Shore arts complexes by funding and building a new $28 million theater complex in Glencoe, designed by the celebrity architect Jeanne Gang.